On this site you will find various libraries and programs I have written in Pascal, C, and Assembler. Everything here is released to the public domain, meaning free to use so long as you credit the original author, Jason M. Knight. A backlink to this website would also be greatly appreciated.
Alright, you art faygelah designers out there want to kvetch about one of my sites looking outdated? Try this on for size! This is supposed to be a retrocomputing site, so let's go whole hog and go for a trip with Mr. Peabody...
Sadly it's been almost a year since I've done anything here. For those of you not aware I'm not in the best of health and been on doctors orders not to work for years... After a stay in the ICU back in February most of my projects have been on hold -- including Paku Paku 2.0 for DOS more on that in a bit -- but I'm slowly recovering. Figured it's been WAY overdue for me to give this site some loving, so here we go.
Not really new, I just swapped the colours back to blue. I was trying for C64 tans with the last one, which looked great on my IPS, but when I saw what it looked like on my media center using a TV (purple instead of tan?!?) I figured it's time for a revamp. Last time people complained the blues were too "bright" even though they were darker than the greens before it (that people complained were too bright) -- Is google too bright in whites and blues? I don't hear people bitching about white backgrounds so... blue and white it is.
I've slowly been pecking away at the new codebase. Shortly after the release of version 1.6 I found that on an unexpanded PCJr the game left a lot to be desired, and in general found a lot of new ways of doing things and improvements across all platforms. Originally this was going to be a version 1.7 release, but I figured if I'm gonna do it, let's do it right.
Holidays took a bit more of my time than planned, then had some 'issues' with getting disqus' comment counts to work right. Turns out they demand a full URI (which is stupid as HELL) to auto-process links on a page. I ended up using the span targeting with the data- attribute method. Not a fan, but it's just too damned stupid the other way around... so, now we have comments at least on the blog parts of the site. I'll be adding comments to some specific sub-pages as I'll likely start adding more article-like content to the site.
I've added a method of creating 'breakpoints' in my articles so I can manually set where the "read the rest of this article" link gets placed. Automating this usually sucks and is a headache, so simply having a 'comment' that says "stop here for the summary" seems a far, far better way of handling it.
When/if I turn this simple "poor man's CMS" into a real content management system, this may be a pretty big feature... though I will still likely require that articles be written in HTML simply because it is the only guaranteed way to have proper control over the output from an accessibility and SEO point of view.
I've been working for, well... years -- mostly in my spare time -- on "upping my game" when it comes to writing games for DOS. My new approach uses a great deal more assembly language and is built towards building monolithic "single executable as the distribution" games instead of a "directory full of files".
I've made huge strides in terms of faster audio with a more 'modular' way of adding sound devices. I've been working towards adding new devices as well as fixing bugs. Likewise my video support is seeing some optimizations, bugfixes, and a whole new way of storing game data and buffering screen output.
If you have any comments/questions, or suggestions for this site, please use our Contact Form and I'll get back to you at the earliest convenience.
This site was created by Jason M. Knight, a retired software engineer with nearly four decades experience in electronics, software development, and graphic arts - not to mention a wide range of hobbies including Saxophone, EWI, programming, carving, drawing, and just being a general pain in the ass on web development forums ripping new holes for the nimrods who think HTML 5, JQuery or Dreamweaver are actually good things.
Featuring articles, tutorials, and rants about web development. The focus of the site on minimalist semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, graceful degradation, and accessible design.
A small lightweight JavaScript library designed to promote good practices without becoming a bloated mess like most of the "frameworks" out there. Simplifies common cross-browser tasks, aids in navigating and manipulating the DOM, and polyfills bits of ECMAScript 5 that are not to be found in any version of IE.
An informational website about the Akai EWI - Electronic Wind Instrument.